Causes and Consequences of Confidence in Democratic Elections

The Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted in the context of the UN in 2015, place emphasis, among others, on fighting poverty, reducing inequalities, and promoting peace, justice and strong institutions. This issue will bring together manuscripts that assess how legal, political, and economic mechanisms and processes in countries of the Global South contribute to or hinder the implementation of pro-poor policies, as well as how “pro-poor” policies are understood and enacted in practice.

We start with a recognition that the meaning of pro-poor policies has a contentious history even among major international organisations that have deployed the term, with a notable tension between the World Bank—which promotes poverty targeting and poverty reduction—versus the UN—that has typically emphasized inequality reduction and more universal approaches to social provisioning. In this respect, the key policy areas that have come to dominate the imagination of pro-poor policies generally focus on social protection policies and labour policies for employment generation, which will also serve as the primary focus of this thematic issue.

The literature in the fields of political science, governance, and political economy has pointed out the need to study formal and informal mechanisms of rule for a proper understanding of the pro-poor effects of such policies and programmes. Major sub-themes include:

• The clout of different types of legal mechanisms in generating pro-poor outcomes;
• The power, interests, and ideologies of rivalling political actors with influence over the shape and outcomes of pro-poor policies (including national governments, international donor agencies, civil society, and private sector actors);
• The constraints and potential solutions that various institutional configurations offer to improve the articulations and outcomes of pro-poor policies;
• The evolution and diffusion of the pro-poor agenda and its contribution to the understanding of pro-poor policymaking and the rethinking of the poverty-reduction challenge.